[ExI] Survival

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Thu Jan 3 11:26:45 UTC 2008


On 03/01/2008, Anne Corwin <sparkle_robot at yahoo.com> wrote:
> For some reason I'm finding this ice-cream speculation terribly amusing.
>
> It sounds silly on the surface, but there's a lot of potential for
> interesting discussion there.  I feel like I *know* I project a "chocolate"
> signal, but I have no idea *why*.

I would have guessed chocolate, but I'm also not sure exactly why;
perhaps something to do with quirkiness, vanilla being in general the
least quirky choice:

http://www.sendicecream.com/15mospopicec.html

(It might be possible to break this down further by geographical
location, gender, age etc. if you had access to all the statistics.)

I suspect that Eliezer and Jef guessed vanilla for me because in the
absence of other evidence, it has the greatest prior probability (at
least, I prefer that explanation rather than that of my evident
non-quirckiness). What they perhaps didn't take into account is that I
chose the vanilla/chocolate dichotomy myself, which would make it at
least a little more likely that chocolate is my favourite than if I
were randomly sampled from the population of ice cream eaters. Perhaps
there is some published experiment in psychology that would hint at
how much of a difference this should make, but I doubt it.



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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